Cooperazione & Relazioni internazionali
Spain: 2007, the year of social entrepreneurs
Ashoka, leaders in social innovation, have awarded four outstanding social entrepreneurs from across Spain, a country where social enterprise is just beginning ...
di Ges
A social entrepreneur is a person with innovative ideas who achieves social changes in his/her environment. This year, the international organisation Ashoka has selected the four Spanish social entrepreneurs below, who gather the merits that a social entrepreneur must possess according to Askoha: innovation, creativity, ethics and a great potential impact.
María Zapata, Director of the Spanish branch of Ashoka, has stated the enormous importance of this recognition in a country where social entrepreneurship is just starting.
The first one is Antonio García Domínguez, who directs Ahige (Men?s Association for Gender Equality), an organisation he wishes to become the reference for men committed to end with gender discrimination and its bad effects on women. This association, located in Málaga (Andalusia), has launched an intervention model in which men become the actors and managers of awareness-raising activities. By team building, working with young people, producing tools and materials and developing awareness-raising activities, Ahige is laying the basis for the creation of a social movement that facilitates that men themselves reanalyse how things stand and take an active role in building an egalitarian society.
Jerónimo Aguado has fought and is fighting to stop the migration from small rural villages. He has made of its home village, Amayuelas de Abajo (Castilla), a sort of laboratory (CIFAES) where self-sustainable agricultural and ecological business projects are tested, having achieved that his own project has become a real alternative to migration towards big cities.
José Manuel Pérez has founded a project called Pericles in Asturias that trains students of primary and secondary education to carry out activities related to the planning, management and evaluation of entrepreneurship projects in order to instill in them an entrepreneurship culture while at the same time achieving that students become aware of the existing social problems in their environment.
Also in Asturias, Faustino García is aiming at transforming the reality from within prison walls. The goal of his project (Valnalón Educa) is achieving inmates? social inclusion on the basis of therapeutic and educational units he launched some years ago. Within these units, inmates and prison officers learn to work together in a team spirit with a view to value-guided education that leads to reintegration.
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